Morale at Meta has seemingly hit rock bottom.
Employees have been roiling from multiple rounds of major layoffs. Last month alone, the Mark Zuckerberg-led company laid off a whopping 8,000 workers, roughly ten percent of its workforce, as part of its chaotic refocusing efforts around AI.
Many of those who remain are now forced to perform the grunt work to train AI models, weekly busywork that’s already driving some of them up the wall, as Wired reports.
In an internal memo to employees on Friday, Zuckerberg attempted to lift their spirits in what appears to be a notable failure to read the room. Specifically, the billionaire promised to host a companywide AI hackathon in July — only to get brutally shut down by workers who were in no mood for such a thing.
Meta has regularly hosted hackathons in the past, but given last month’s layoff announcement, the reception was extremely chilly.
“I’m literally preoccupied with keeping the lights on for my team,” one employee wrote in an internal message quoted by Wired. “I have no incentive to participate, let alone have the time to do so.”
“I’m not sure that this company supports a hackathon culture anymore,” another employee added, pointing out that “people are being asked to cover more work with less support while their colleagues get laid off.”
“I’ve participated in previous hackathons, but this no longer feels like an option alongside pod sprints in my corner of the company,” one worker wrote.
Zuckerberg offered employees access to permanent desks, a symbolic gesture that unintentionally illustrated how expendable many of them had become. Many employees at Meta have been working from “hot desks,” a controversial scheme involving multiple workers sharing the same desks.
For all its employees’ pain and suffering, Meta has surprisingly little to show. The company continues to trip over its own feet, struggling to release impressive new AI models as its competitors pull ahead further in the ongoing AI race. In his memo, Zuckerberg predicted that even more difficult days could be ahead for the company, despite vowing to hold off on any future layoffs for the rest of the year.
“Given the complexity of these changes, we’ve made mistakes and will almost certainly make more,” he admitted.
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